Witchy Possessions (Witchy Fingers Book 3)

by Nic Saint

“Ernestine is right,” murmured Edelie. “This will go so wrong…”

  “Oh, don’t be such gloomy gooses, you guys,” said Estrella. “We just need a little practice, that’s all.”

  “Practice in making clones?” I asked.

  “How hard can it be? We just take any old person… and clone them!”

  “And then kill the clone,” added Edelie skeptically. “Nice.”

  “Well, if you’ve got a better idea I’m open to suggestions,” Estrella said primly, then turned back to the barista, to whom she’d taken quite a liking, apparently, and he to her, judging from the way he kept grinning at her.

  Great. We were trying to tackle the biggest challenge of our lives, and Strel was flirting with the help. Talk about getting your priorities straight.

  “Oh, and I called Skip,” Estrella said. “He should be here any minute.”

  I glanced at her. “Skip? Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Sure. We can’t pull this off by ourselves,” said Estrella. “You were right about that. We need our able-bodied assistant,” she added with a grin.

  Skip Brown was an ex-baker we’d roped into assisting us with our new venture. So far he hadn’t been much use. Over the summer he’d interned at Bell’s Bakery in Happy Bays, while we were trying to come up with a business plan… on the beach. Now it was time to get serious, as we couldn’t keep scrounging off Gran, a fact which she’d pointed out to us more than once. Either we got regular jobs again, or got our business to turn a profit.

  “I wonder what Skip will have to say about this,” I said.

  “I don’t think we should tell him,” said Edelie. “I mean, we signed that NDA, and to my knowledge it didn’t include Skip.”

  “It does include Skip,” I said. “He’s part of Flummox, Inc.”

  Just then, the door to the coffee shop swung open and Skip walked in. He’s a skinny young man with a liberally pimpled and pockmarked face and greasy long hair that would have been en vogue during the heady days of the seventies when the use of shampoo was considered an extravagance of the bourgeoisie. He’s a fun-loving guy, so I didn’t know if this assignment would measure up to his idea of what constituted fun. But as we explained things to him, it seemed he was fully on board with the outrageous scheme.

  “Kill Petunia Hudson! For real?!” he exclaimed.

  We quickly shushed him and pointed out the existence of the NDA.

  A little quieter, he repeated, “Kill Petunia Hudson! This is huge!”

  Well, it was, of course. In fact it was so huge we didn’t know where to begin.

  “I like your idea about the clone,” he told Estrella, who perked up considerably.

  “I knew you would,” she said warmly, patting his arm.

  “But are you sure you can clone Petunia Hudson? She’s… unique.”

  “Well…” Strel hesitated. “We’ve never tried.”

  “But that has never stopped us before,” Edelie said with a shrug.

  “We just need to pick someone to experiment on,” Estrella repeated her earlier idea, and gave Skip a very deliberate look that spoke volumes.

  When our young assistant and jack-of-all-trades walked into this coffee shop he probably didn’t know he was walking into his own Wonderland.

  His eyes went wide and he paled beneath his pimples. “You want to clone… me?”

  “Sure, why not?” Estrella asked lightly. “And don’t worry. We’re going to kill your clone, so you’re not going to be saddled with him all your life.”

  I knew what she was talking about. We’d all seen what excessive cloning could do in the movie Multiplicity, when Michael Keaton creates so many clones of himself they became more and more loopy as time went on.

  “Yeah, I loved that movie,” Skip confirmed, “but this is real life. You can’t just clone a person and then kill off the clone. Can you?”

  “Of course we can,” said Estrella, extremely self-confident as usual. “In fact we should do it right now.”

  “No!” I cried, a little too loudly, for the other patrons all looked up. “No,” I hissed. “We should wait. What will people think when there’s suddenly two Skips?”

  “They’ll just… think it’s his twin brother?” asked Edelie.

  “Chill out, Stien,” said Estrella. “This is the perfect occasion to find out if we can do this.”

  “Yeah, Stien,” said Edelie with a crooked smile. “Chill already, will you? What could possibly go wrong if we clone Skip in the middle of a very crowded coffee shop in the middle of a very crowded Manhattan?”

  Chapter 9

  Skip hadn’t known what to expect when he walked into Fritz’s Fizzy Fuss that morning. He knew that with the Flummox sisters life was never boring, of course, but that they were going to clone him had never occurred to him.

  He liked the idea, though. After all, someone had to be the guinea pig to try this new technique on, and whenever Estrella suggested something, he was fully on board. He liked Estrella. The way she could look at him with those incredible blue eyes of hers had his tender heart fluttering out of control each time.

  So when Estrella, Edelie and Ernestine discreetly raised their hands and started muttering a spell, he was perfectly fine with it and hoped they didn’t muck it up, as they so often did. But even if they did, it would be worth it.

  He was seated next to Estrella, and when suddenly someone tapped him on the shoulder and he found himself staring into his own face, he wasn’t as much surprised as absolutely aghast, for he didn’t like what he saw.

  For one thing, he hadn’t known he was so… ugly!

  “Christ!” he cried. “Is that really what I look like?!”

  The new Skip, or rather the new version of the old Skip, looked horrible!

  His face was full of the kind of craters you see in NASA Moon shots, and then there was the fact that he was pale—too pale for a guy who’d spent most of his summer hanging out on the beach in The Hamptons.

  What had happened to his tan?

  “What has happened to your tan?” the newcomer asked.

  “No, what has happened to your tan?” he asked.

  “No, what has happened to your tan?” his clone insisted.

  “No, what…”

  “Look,” said Estrella, placing her hands on both their shoulders, “you look identical, so don’t argue about whose tan looks the worst. You’re both equally… untanned.” She grinned at them and then exclaimed, “You’re identical! A perfect match!” She turned to her sisters. “You see? I told you this was a piece of cake. Now all we have to do is repeat the process with Petunia. And kill her, of course.”

  But as Skip stared at his lookalike, he suddenly felt another tap on his shoulder, and when he turned around, saw that another version of himself was standing there, asking him about his tan and the state of his pimples.

  “Yikes!” he cried, and even Estrella had to admit this wasn’t part of the program.

  “Um… What’s going on?” she asked as she stared from Original Skip to Skip 2, the copy, and then to Skip 3, the copy of the copy, he assumed.

  “I think we made a mistake in the formulation of the spell,” said Ernestine as she rubbed her chin seriously.

  There was another tap on Skip’s shoulder, and this time, when he turned to look, he was already half expecting to stare into his own face so the surprise factor wasn’t as great as the first time.

  “Hey, there,” said the newcomer. “Are you Skip Brown?”

  “I am Skip Brown,” he said.

  “What a coincidence. I’m Skip Brown, too,” said Skip Brown. Then he gestured at the other Skips. “Are they Skip Brown, too?”

  “They’re all Skips, but I’m the original so you better behave, buddy.”

  “Oh,” said Skip 4 with a stupid grin. “Right. Of course.” He looked a little dumber than the previous Skip, Skip thought, but that could simply be his imagination, of course. Or had he always looked like this? This clone business was wreaking havoc
on his self-esteem!

  For the next couple of minutes, the taps on his shoulder kept on coming, and so did the Skips, and when soon the place was filled with Skips, even the three witches were starting to get a little worried, as the regular customers all stared and then soon started to feel this was probably a flash mob thing, and started clapping and cheering, fully expecting them to start dancing now!

  And then they all got out their smartphones and started filming the scene.

  “Oh, no,” said Ernestine. “That’s the last thing we need. Let’s go, Skip!”

  “You mean, skip out?” he asked.

  “Yes, and take the other Skips with you,” she said. “We need to go someplace less conspicuous.”

  “Let’s go to Central Park,” suggested Estrella. “We can bring in the drones and kill off all those extra Skips. Like target practice.”

  Skip was starting to feel a little hot under the collar now. “Kill off all the Skips?” he asked. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

  “Yeah, we need to get rid of them. It’s part of my plan,” she explained.

  “Oh,” he said, clearly not having paid attention. “Just make sure you don’t kill me, will you? I don’t want to go through life a clone of myself.”

  Even though that might not be such a bad idea, actually. If a clone was really a carbon copy of the original, it didn’t really matter who lived on, did it? Still, he didn’t feel like dying today, so he asked, “How are your drones going to know I’m Original Skip, Strel? How are they going to distinguish?”

  “Mh…” she said, eyeing him thoughtfully. “You need a distinguishing mark.” Then her face cleared. “You know what? Wear one of those hats!”

  He followed her gaze. Fritz’s Fizzy Fuss’s logo was a pink fuzzy hat, and they were pinned to the walls. So he now removed one and tentatively donned it. He probably looked all kinds of silly, but when you’re about to be blown away by a drone, appearance isn’t very high on your list of priorities.

  “Great,” Strel said.

  And when he looked in the mirror, he saw that not only did he look pale and ugly, he also looked like a complete moron. And then the other Skips promptly followed his example and started picking the fuzzy pink hats from the walls as well, effectively defeating the entire purpose of the exercise!

  “Oh, no, no, no!” he cried. “Don’t do that. That’s for Original Skip only!”

  “Oh, no, no, no!” they all cried. “That’s for Original Skip only!”

  They really were exact copies of himself, he thought.

  “Um, I think we need something else,” he told the three sisters, and they agreed in principle, though it seemed a little fuzzy how to accomplish the feat.

  Then, finally, Estrella took the big black marker Fritz used to write his menus on the whiteboard next to the bar, and wrote a big number one on his forehead, then started down the line of Skips and numbered them as she went along. But since there were more Skips joining the merry band all the time, she quickly ran out of patience, and the last ones would have to go through their short lives unencumbered by a number.

  “Let’s move out!” she now cried, like a general instructing her army.

  And then they were ambling down the street, an army of Skips, Original Skip leading the effort, and the other Skips all following closely behind.

  They drew a lot of attention from onlookers, who all laughed and promptly took out their phones and started filming the procession of the Skips. And the further they got, the bigger the group got, as more and more Skips were being added to the fold all the time.

  “I don’t think this is going to end well,” Skip muttered, and Ernestine, who’d joined him at the head of the procession while Edelie and Estrella shepherded the others, making sure they were all heading in the same general direction as Original Skip, agreed heartily.

  “Not one of Estrella’s better ideas,” she intimated.

  “How are you going to kill off all these Skips?” he asked.

  He watched as a few Skips had begun skipping along the street, and soon the others all followed suit, now forming a small army of skipping Skips. This was just crazy! And since people seemed to think this was all part of some street theater thing, he feared that soon the media would pick this up and send camera crews to film the ever-expanding parade.

  “Um… I have absolutely no idea,” Ernestine said. “The original idea was to obliterate Petunia with a drone attack, but I don’t see how a drone attack on native soil would be even plausible. There are probably laws against that.”

  “Well, it could be a rogue drone,” he suggested. “You know? A drone that has gone off the reservation for some reason.” He liked the idea of a drone attack. Though he would have preferred a spaceship, of course. But when he suggested this idea to Ernestine, she seemed to think he was crazy.

  “A spaceship? Are you nuts?”

  “Why? Spaceships obliterate stuff all the time. Like in Independence Day, or even Star Wars. They can do a lot more damage than a measly little drone.”

  “Spaceships don’t exist, Skip,” she pointed out, “or at least not the ones you see in the movies. And they certainly can’t kill Petunia Hudson. The police wouldn’t believe for a moment one of the greatest living rock stars was killed by a spaceship!”

  “Yeah, it does sound like a story from The Onion,” he admitted. So a drone strike it was. But when he looked back at his clones, he thought one drone wouldn’t cut it. “I think you’re going to need an entire fleet of drones to take out all these clones,” he said, shaking his head.

  “This is why Gran always says we shouldn’t practice witchcraft outside of the house,” she said. “We always manage to mess it up!”

  They’d arrived at Central Park and moved into the green haven in the heart of New York en masse, Original Skip leading the hundred or so Skip clones. Estrella and Edelie had joined their sister at the head of the cavalcade, and they moved to The Great Lawn, where they would have the requisite space to arrange the elimination of the clones.

  Once they arrived, like a group of school children on an outing, Skip watched as the three sisters raised their hands again, standing in front of the small army of Skips, and allowed a stream of sparks to dance from their fingertips. The red, blue and yellow sparks quickly joined in one glittering plume of gold, rising up into the air.

  Before long, there was a distinct rumble as clouds moved in and the sky became overcast. Skip stared up, and then thought he saw something dark and metallic move across the sun, and then he saw… a gigantic Zeppelin drift into his field of vision, quickly blocking out the sun and plunging the park in darkness! It looked like one of those huge blimps Hitler was so fond of.

  Oh, my God, he thought. They’d gone for a drone, and managed to create a Zeppelin instead! But how was a blimp going to fix the problem of the Skip clones? Blimps don’t carry bombs and weapons, do they? They carry Harrison Ford and Sean Connery trying to escape a Nazi-infested Berlin!

  The Skips all stood gathered together, staring up at the darkening skies, and then, suddenly, as Original Skip watched, the blimp bumped into Falcone Tower and… tore a hole in its gigantic belly!

  This wasn’t good, he thought. And he could see from the expression of panic on the Flummox sisters’ faces that they didn’t think this was going to end well, either. Deep frowns were now etched on their faces as they whispered furious spells, their hands still raised. But whatever they were doing, it wasn’t helping, for the Zeppelin was now sailing straight at them, helium pouring from its distended form. A single spark and the entire thing could blow up and cover the entire Central Park in a giant conflagration!

  Chapter 10

  And just when Skip thought they were all going to die, suddenly he saw a familiar figure approaching, vigorously and with intent in her step hurrying toward them. It was Cassandra Beadsmore, and he’d never been happier to see her. Judging from the look on her face, she didn’t feel the same way.

  She took one look a
t the army of Skips, another look at the sky, where the gigantic blimp was threatening to kill them all, and life as they knew it in Central Park, and then she snapped her fingers once, and to Skip’s surprise his clones started popping, like so many bubbles, one after the other, and disappearing before his very eyes. Pop, pop, pop! Like a chain reaction!

  Then she snapped her fingers again, and the big balloon overhead also popped with a loud pop, and the danger that had hovered over them moments before, simply vanished. And as the popping sounds of the popping Skips filled the air, she walked up to her three granddaughters, and from the following altercation it was clear she was telling them some very harsh truths.

  No, Skip thought, this cloning idea might have looked good on paper, but in reality it definitely wasn’t the way to go. Which still left the eternal question: how to make Petunia Hudson die while not making her die? It was one of those conundrums, if that was the word he was looking for.

  He kept his distance from the foursome, as it was obvious this was one of those family moments he had no business getting mixed up in. And then there was the fact that Cassandra looked terrifying when she was angry. And he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t pop him like a balloon too. Good thing Estrella had written that big number on his forehead, or else he might be dead now.

  He wiped beads of sweat from his brow. Working for the Flummox sisters was never boring, but it was also fraught with a modicum of danger.

  And then Cassandra walked up to him and eyed him with solicitousness. “Are you all right, my boy? Did my granddaughters hurt you in any way?”

  “Oh, no, I’m perfectly fine,” he assured her, glad she wasn’t angry with him for the part he’d played in this debacle.

  “Perhaps you should find yourself another job,” she suggested now, placing a motherly hand on his cheek. “Working for the girls might not be a good fit for you.”

  He grinned. “As long as you’re around to make things right again, I think I’m safe.”

  She smiled. “What a dreadful business! Whatever were they thinking?!”